All quotes are from THE HALF-ORPHAN’S HANDBOOK by Joan F. Smith.
1. I hadn’t know that hearts were like flowers, and that life could change them, peel away their layers like fallen petals. If I could guard myself enough, maybe I could control whether or not I’d be destroyed again.
2. Aside from life-or-death matters, nothing sucked more than sourness between people who loved each other.
3. Dying isn’t supposed to be a choice. That it’s not fair to the people you leave behind if you make it one.
4. You’ll meet people who can understand you the way most of the other people in your life can’t.
5. Lying awake in the middle of the night is a special kind of hell. Your body is tired; your mind is electrified. You will it to quiet down, at least until dawn, but it runs and runs and runs.
6. The better we know ourselves, the better we figure out how to feel in a variety of situations.
7. That’s how caring got to you. While it pressed against your walls, it made you think it was beautiful, until it broke you, flooding your insides with destruction and hurt.
8. Writers used words as fists.
9. Sometimes people weren’t safe where they were supposed to be.
10. Sometimes you’re going up. Sometimes you’re going down. Eventually you figure out that there are tunnels and that maybe you’re on the mountain of many, but no matter what kind of hiking boots or backpack you get, you’re still climbing a fucking mountain.
11. Sometimes it feels like time really does slow down at pivotal moments, almost to the point of reversing, and then speeds up to catch up to everyone else’s timeline.
12. We felt anger most when something threatened the thing we cared about the most.
13. When the listener understood what the speaker was saying, their brains matched. If you mapped out what portions of their brains lit up, they’d be twinning.
14. When there’s communication between two people, when there’s true understanding, their brains are mirrored. They’re one.
15. Life’s about taking risks and chances with yourself. If you cut yourself off from everything—if you close off all those beautiful parts of yourself, then why bother?
16. The moment you realize you don’t have control over what anyone else does is the moment you find yourself comfortable with your world.
17. The handbook was my way of trying to make sense of my world. But the part of me that had penned that first rule hadn’t considered that someone else might make me feel…happy. Safe.
18. Truth had a funny way of prying itself to the surface.
19. It’s funny, the way our brains process things. Not ha-ha funny, but finding-the-meaning-in-literature funny.
20. To guard my emotions, to make sure no one else could leave me or betray me or hurt me, I had to silence my heart.
21. I carry more than one sad story in my own pockets.
22. Not every loss is a death.
23. Suicide is the action of someone in such desperate pain that they are difficult to blame.
24. If there was one thing I could count on, it was the strength of my own mind.
25. You’re going to love people. They’re going to let you down. If they didn’t, then maybe you wouldn’t know how much you valued them in the first place.
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